Lectures on Landscape

by John Ruskin

John Ruskin (1819-1900) is best known for his work as an art critic and social critic, but is remembered as an author, poet and artist as well. Ruskin's essays on art and architecture were extremely influential in the Victorian and Edwardian eras. Ruskin's range was vast. He wrote over 250 works which started from art history, but expanded to cover topics ranging over science, geology, ornithology, literary criticism, the environmental effects of pollution, and mythology. In 1848, he married Effie Gray, for whom he wrote the early fantasy novel The King of the Golden River. After his death Ruskin's works were collected together in a massive "library edition," completed in 1912 by his friends Edward Cook and Alexander Wedderburn. Its index is famously elaborate, attempting to articulate the complex interconnectedness of his thought. His other works include: Giotto and his works in Padua (1854), The Harbours of England (1856), "A Joy for Ever" (1857), The Ethics of the Dust (1866) and Hortus Inclusus.

Genres: Art, Nonfiction

60 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1871

About the author

Librarian Note: There is more than one author by this name in the Goodreads database.

John Ruskin was an English writer, philosopher, art historian, art critic and polymath of the Victorian era. He wrote on subjects as varied as geology, architecture, myth, ornithology, literature, education, botany and political economy.
Ruskin was heavily engaged by the work of Eugène-Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc which he taught to all his pupils including William Morris, notably Viollet-le-Duc's Dictionary, which he considered as "the only book of any value on architecture". Ruskin's writing styles and literary forms were equally varied. He wrote essays and treatises, poetry and lectures, travel guides and manuals, letters and even a fairy tale. He also made detailed sketches and paintings of rocks, plants, birds, landscapes, architectural structures and ornamentation. The elaborate style that characterised his earliest writing on art gave way in time to plainer language designed to communicate his ideas more effectively. In all of his writing, he emphasised the connections between nature, art and society.
Ruskin was hugely influential in the latter half of the 19th century and up to the First World War. After a period of relative decline, his reputation has steadily improved since the 1960s with the publication of numerous academic studies of his work. Today, his ideas and concerns are widely recognised as having anticipated interest in environmentalism, sustainability and craft.
Ruskin first came to widespread attention with the first volume of Modern Painters (1843), an extended essay in defence of the work of J.M.W. Turner in which he argued that the principal role of the artist is "truth to nature". From the 1850s, he championed the Pre-Raphaelites, who were influenced by his ideas. His work increasingly focused on social and political issues. Unto This Last (1860, 1862) marked the shift in emphasis. In 1869, Ruskin became the first Slade Professor of Fine Art at the University of Oxford, where he established the Ruskin School of Drawing. In 1871, he began his monthly "letters to the workmen and labourers of Great Britain", published under the title Fors Clavigera (1871–1884). In the course of this complex and deeply personal work, he developed the principles underlying his ideal society. As a result, he founded the Guild of St George, an organisation that endures today.

Reviews

[Thing Two · Rating 3 out of 5]

I'm exploring Ruskin in preparation for my dive into Proust in 2013. This collection had three lectures on landscape paintings - outline, light and shade, color - and included plates of paintings by Turner, Lippi, and Reynolds.

I'll admit I knowing very little about art, and spending my time in galleries staring at paintings Bueller-style, but I did enjoy reading this 60 page lecture collection. It gave me new eyes for old landscape paintings.

[Steve · Rating 4 out of 5]

"Landscape painting is the thoughtful and passionate representation of the physical conditions appointed for human existence. It imitates the aspects, and records the phenomena, of the visible things which are dangerous or beneficial to men; and displays the human methods of dealing with these, and of enjoying them or suffering from them, which are either exemplary or deserving of sympathetic contemplation. Animal painting investigates the laws of greater and less nobility of character in organic form, as comparative anatomy examines those of greater and less development in organic[Pg 2] structure; and the function of animal painting is to bring into notice the minor and unthought of conditions of power or beauty, as that of physiology is to ascertain the minor conditions of adaptation."
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[coloribusindico · Rating 3 out of 5]

Will read more from Ruskin, This was a great read (just not my cup of tea but enjoyed it nonetheless)

[Richard Thompson · Rating 4 out of 5]

After reading Ruskin's lectures on landscape art, I have been walking around for a week looking at every outdoors scene as painting -- how would I find the meaning in scene? where are the sharp outlines? where are the subtleties of shading? where are the elements of color? Any piece of reading that can have that kind of lingering impact on my thinking is something to be savored and appreciated. I can't wait to go to a museum and look at some paintings through my new Ruskin glasses.

[Café · Rating 2 out of 5]

Remember that old middle school professor who was not open to new or alternative forms of art, who taught you only what he was taught by his professors in school and who would follow the textbook as the bible? That's Ruskin.

[Velvetink]

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